Ready Player One Might Be a Movie But the Book is Still Unfilmable

I read Ready, Player One about two years ago maybe?  Anyway, I enjoyed it but even though I heard there was a movie coming it seemed pretty unfilmable in its original form.  I mean the thing is packed full of references to 70s and 80s TV shows, movies, and video games.  In making a movie it would be impossible to actually get the rights to all of the properties.

The first teaser trailer dropped in the summer and at first it was OK but thinking about it, I realized if you hadn't read the book it wouldn't have made any sense.  There was really no sense of the plot in the teaser.

When I went to The Last Jedi they had a new trailer that does actually give more shape to the plot.  But it also confirms my original thought that the book itself is really unfilmable for the reason I gave.

Because they can't get all the rights to all the old properties (or maybe didn't try to) in the trailers you see all these newer properties:  Iron Giant, Overwatch, Injustice 2, etc.  The latter two are nice product placement I guess.  But using these demonstrates a critical misunderstanding of the book itself.

The crux of the book is that about 30 years in the future everything is overcrowded to the point that people live in parks where trailers are stacked on top of each other like makeshift skyscrapers.  (Why not?  Thanks to Trump we won't have any building regulations anymore.)  For poor kids like the main character, Wade, the only escape is the virtual reality world called the Oasis.

The creator of the Oasis became a rich recluse and when he died left behind a video announcing sort of a Willy Wonka scheme:  that there is a treasure buried in the Oasis and whoever finds it gets to own the Oasis and the billions of dollars that comes with it.

So Wade and everyone else has been scouring the Oasis for clues.  Young people like Wade have taken to watching all the shows the creator used to love and playing all the old games and stuff like that so they can try to pick up on any hidden clues.  I don't mean they just watch or read or play it once; they do it dozens if not hundreds of times, obsessively analyzing each and every bit of it.  To them all this old stuff from the 70s and 80s really becomes like a religion.

So when you show them using characters from the 90s or 2000s or 2010s it doesn't jive with the book.  Not just because some of that stuff wouldn't have existed yet when the book was written, but because everything after 1989 is pretty much irrelevant to them because it was largely irrelevant to this creator guy who is like their god.

I can see Spielbergo and company saying, "Ultraman, Iron Giant, what's the difference?"  It's a huge difference!  It'd be like saying St. Peter was really St. Penelope or Christmas should be July 4th instead of December 25th.  Blasphemy!

I'm not just being an anal retentive fan about this.  I'm saying that this represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the world depicted in the book.  Like if Peter Jackson had made the Hobbits normal size or Sauron a giant rabbit or something.  To a cynical director or producer (or viewer) this might not seem like a big deal but for people in the know it actually is.

Anyway, the movie might be fine, but it'll never be the book any more than the Watchmen movie is the graphic novel.  Even though I didn't mind changing the ending, some people consider getting rid of the giant "alien" squid monster to be blasphemy.  While the final product might still have most of the spirit, it can't duplicate the real thing.

This Daily Beast article covers some of the same ground.

Oh, yeah, here's the trailer: